- Women in Celtic and Germanic cultures often fought alongside the men, most notably at the last phase of the Lusitanian Wars and during the Teutonic invasions of Rome. However, there are reports of all-female fighting units in Germanic tribes, which Romans identified with the legendary Amazons. A Roman writer also claimed that in the Gallaeci Artabri tribe, women marched to war while men defended the cities.
- Women in ancient Iranian cultures, such as the Scythians, the Sarmatians, and even the Persians, frequently fought alongside the men, and might have formed female-only squads. Most likely they were also the Trope Maker, due to inspiring Greek myths about the Amazons (Greek writers in the Archaic Period placed the Amazons in the region). Archaeology in the 2010s validated
much of the myths, with about a quarter of Scythian warriors being discovered in certain grave sites being women. - Sun Tzu earned his reputation by forming one, allegedly. Before he was a famed strategist, he was tasked to turn 180 concubines into soldiers, to demonstrate his ability. Though he had to decapitate two of them to get the others to pay attention to his orders.
- The shieldmaidens of Viking Age Scandinavia which may or may not have existed in history and were likely inspired by the Valkyries of Norse mythology.
- In Chinese folklore, the widows of the Yang generals during the Song Dynasty. When most of the Yang menfolk were killed defending a fort from Liao invaders, the women of the clan took up arms to confront the Liao army. This has been dramatised in films such as The 14 Amazons and The Legendary Amazons.
- Hernán Cortés had a specialized unit of conquistadoras during the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire, most of them wives of soldiers who had refused to Stay in the Kitchen and acted as both soldiers and battlefield medics. Its more famous members were its founder María de Estrada (whom chroniclers called one of Cortés' best soldiers, period), Isabel Rodríguez (probably the first official female doctor in the history of America), Beatriz Palacios (who was also famous for being mulatta) and Beatriz Bermúdez de Velasco (whose leadership skills were vital in the siege of Tenochtitlan).
- When the Portuguese Indian city of Diu was besieged by the Ottoman Empire in 1538, its commander João de Mascarenhas formed an all-female unit to replenish their small forces, with notorious members being Isabel Madeira, Catarina Lopes and Isabel Fernandes (this one nicknamed "The Old Woman of Diu", being possibly also a case of Never Mess with Granny). Ultimately, the defenders were successful and managed to rout the Turks.
- The Amazon River was so named because one of the Spanish explorers who discovered it, Francisco de Orellana, reported encountering a tribe of warrior women there, who he compared to the Amazons of Greek mythology.
- Ikeda Sen was a 16th century onna-bugeisha (female samurai) who fought in several battles as a member of the Toyotomi Army. At the Battle of Shizugatake in 1583, she commanded a 200-strong musketeer unit consisting entirely of women.
- During the Boshin War in Japan, Lady of War Takeko Nakano led one that was later retroactively called the Women's Army (娘子隊 Jōshitai?).
- North Korea fields a number of army regiments that are entirely composed of women. They're more commonly seen marching in propaganda parades, but reports and photos of female units actively patrolling the DMZ are not unheard of.
- The 40-woman Amazonian Guard◊ of the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi (may his spellings be many). Officially they were known as the Green Nuns, but western media tended to refer to them as the Amazonian Guard. After Gaddafi was deposed and shot dead, their not-so glamorous side came to light.
- Not to mention the famous Dahomey Amazons, or Mino, who composed a third of the Dahomeyan Army in the 19th Century. Fanatically dedicated and intensively trained, they were nearly unbeatable for three and a half centuries, instilling fear the hearts of their tribal neighbors. Jean Bayol, a French officer who visited Abomey recounted an experience in which he watched a teenage recruit, as part of her induction, savagely behead a prisoner with a sword which she then drank the remaining blood from. However, they were substantially less effective against actual professional (male) soldiers: when the French officially engaged Dahomey in war, the Dahomey Amazons were quickly annihilated, even when the French weren't able to bring their firearms to bear. This was demonstrated quite well at Adegon, where a handful of outnumbered French regulars absolutely annihilated the Mino/Amazons after their engagement devolved into hand-to-hand and spear-to-bayonet combat, killing 503 Dahomey Amazons (nearly half their entire establishment) for the loss of only 6 soldiers. Nevertheless, European historians frequently expressed admiration of the warriors' exceptional bravery and prowess even in comparison to their male counterparts, and the First Franco-Dahomean war saw some of the most iconic accounts of the women's ferocity, such as in an early battle in Kotonou when a Dahomey warrior knocked down a French soldier and tore out his larynx with her teeth.
- There were three all-female combat Soviet Air Force units in World War II, which together flew a total of 30,000 combat sorties, produced 30 Heroes of the Soviet Union (the highest honour available) and 2 fighter aces (the only recorded female aces in history). The most famous of these was the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, nicknamed the "Night Witches" by the Germans. Not only did they fly over 23,000 sorties and is said to have dropped 3,000 tons of bombs, it was also the most highly-decorated unit in the Soviet Air Force at the time, receiving 23 Heroes of the Soviet Union awards. Not only that, they flew horrifically out of date, wood and canvas Po-2 bi-plane bombers originally constructed for training and crop dusting - and these planes proved excellently suited for precision night bombing, the reason this regiment was called Night Witches. Weak engine means a quiet engine, plane designed for trainees must have a low stalling speed, reducing noise even more, and low speed gives you an excellent bombing accuracy. Their maximum speed was sometimes below the stall speed of German fighters, and they flew at treetop level. This made them almost impossible to shoot down, to the point that the Germans promised an Iron Cross to anybody who managed to do it. They could only carry six 50-kilo bombs, but randomly dropping them on German positions, combined with all the searchlights and Anti-Air going off, kept German troops from getting any sleep, reducing their combat effectiveness. They could show up almost anywhere on the Eastern Front without warning. Oh and they almost always made their runs without parachutes because they would weigh down the planes too much. (There are several works listed above that dramatize the story of the Night Witches).
- The Soviets also fielded several all-female anti-aircraft units. The most famous was the 1077th Anti-Aircraft Regiment, made up of hastily-trained young women, some not even out of high school. Assigned to cover the northern suburbs of Staligrad, they found themselves the only unit blocking the German 16th Panzer Division when it unexpected broke through Red Army defenses. Despite not having any armor-piercing shells, they lowered their guns to fire directly on the approaching enemy. This did little to the tanks, but tore through infantry and lighter vehicles, holding up the entire German advance and forcing the Germans to take out each gun emplacement before they could move on. The 1077th managed to hold their ground long enough for the Soviets to bring in reinforcements, likely preventing the capture of Stalingrad.
- There were also numerous female Soviet snipers (one, Lyudmila Pavlicenko got 309 confirmed kills before being pulled off the front line and used for propaganda purposes), and occasionally tank crews. However, both are cases of desperation in a way; the Soviets mobilized almost totally to repel the Germans.
- Lyudmila Pavlicenko was so awesome that Woody Guthrie actually wrote a song about her shooting Germans, she was that cool.
- The militsiya police during and directly after WWII. Soviet police had to recruit amazon brigades, because all the men were busy on the frontlines.
- During World War I there was a battalion made up entirely of women, led by a woman named Maria Bochkareva, who personally petitioned the Czar to be allowed to serve in the Russian Army to escape her abusive husband. Towards the end of the war, she was put in charge of the Women's Battalion of Death. It was something of a publicity stunt to try and raise morale in the Russian Army. It failed, and about eight months after they were formed Lenin overthrew the Russian Provincial Government and the rest is history.
- The Provisional Government planned to recruit several more such units, including the awesomely named Women's Black Hussars of Death Squadron. None had seen combat when the Bolsheviks took over.
- Some members of the Women's Battalion of Death were part of the last-ditch defense of the Winter Palace against the Bolsheviks during Red October.
- During the Russo-Japanese War there was an all-woman cavalry regiment. The officers were daughters of the country nobility who from hunting could ride and shoot as well as their brothers; the enlisted women were recruited from a Central Asian tribe with a strong Amazonian tradition.
- The United States Marine Corps developed the "Lioness Program" for use in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lioness is an all-female team meant to conduct culturally-sensitive searches, but in practice have done much more. The Lionesses have proven extremely useful for building rapport with the locals and gathering intelligence (and should it come to that, "Every Marine is a Rifleman," even if she's not a man).
- During The Mexican Revolution there were Las Soldaderas: active female soldiers fighting hand-in-hand with their fathers, sons, and brothers. When their husband died, they wouldn't cry, they'd say "Dame la pistola!" and ride off into battle.
- The Women Guard of the Reds in the Finnish Civil War 1918. Inspiring both awe and admiration on the White side (some Whites called them "she-wolves" others "Northern Amazons" as they managed to repulse a German assault unit in combat), they nevertheless inspired the victorious Whites to found the Lotta Svärd women's army auxiliary organization. Women were finally allowed to serve in all branches of the armed forces in 1992.
- This◊ Chinese militia, armed with BFSs.
- During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, the feminist and socialist leader Louise Michel organized a women's complement to the Eighteenth Arrondissement Vigilance Committee, essentially a citizen militia to defend Paris.
- The Kurdish Peshmerga forces are already about 40% women, but for the struggle against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, they've recently been fielding all-female formations of up to 500 fighters strong as an extra "fuck you" to the violently patriarchal religious fundamentalists. It's believed that the ISIS fighters fear they won't go to heaven if a woman kicks them from this mortal coil, and whether or not this is true, it's helped boost the Kurds' morale - and all the women in uniform has helped Peshmerga recruitment, too.
- Ironically, ISIS themselves made use of this with the Al-Khansaa Brigades, an all-female morality police employed to patrol the capital of Raqqa. While female terrorists aren't exactly new (as with the Chechen "black widows" and Hamas-employed suicide bombers), the Al-Khansaa are notorious for being women that use weapons, drive, sometimes fight in frontlines and act specifically as a Secret Police in contrast to the Taliban, who sank to truly ridiculous lows to oppress women. But make no mistake, at the end of the day the Al-Khansaa were just as vicious and brutal as their male counterparts due to being indoctrinated in the same extremist ideology and had no problem lashing women for going out without their chaperone, not being fully covered or wearing make up, as well as agreeing with the sex trafficking of Yazidi women.
- The Forty Elephants were a street gang composed entirely of women.
- Japanese girl-gangs (sukeban) were just as prone to violence as their male counterparts. At the subculture’s peak, the largest alliance had over 20,000 teenage girls sworn in. See Japanese Delinquents for more information.
- In 2014, Norway established the Jegertroppen, or "Hunter Troop", the world's first all-female special forces training program.
- A group of young women guarded a bank in the Philippines during the 1970s.
- The Gulabi Gang is a group of vigilantes who protect and avenge abused women in India.
- Eastside Los Angeles has an all-female group of bikers called the Ovarian Psycos.
- Recent years have seen the formation of the Asgarda tribe in Ukraine.
- The Trưng Sisters were known for successfully rebelling against the Han Dynasty's occupation of Vietnam by assembling an army composed mostly of women. According to legend, the Chinese were able to disperse the army by sending in their troops butt naked, making the women too embarrassed to fight.note
- A contemporary example are the Akashinga ("brave ones"), anti-poaching units recruiting from local women in rural Zimbabwe. The women were recruited because they tend to be less macho and corrupt than men, making them better at de-escalation and less inclined to take bribes, but they also receive combat training from an ex-special forces instructor, and are fully prepared to confront armed poachers.
- The Nicaraguan revolution was avowedly feminist and so of course they had female soldiers fight both during the revolution itself and in the ensuing civil war. A postcard with a picture of woman breastfeeding an infant and a rifle slung over her back which was taken in the 1980s is still sold occasionally at markets.
- The White Tights of urban legend, a group of blonde, white-clad sniper women with a hate-on for the Russians. Allegedly formed of women from Eastern European countries such as Estonia and Latvia, where hating Russia is a national pastime. According to rumors, they fought in Chechnya on the Separatist side, and were brutalized by Federal army grunts in case of capture (every Federal soldier had a friend of a friend who allegedly captured, raped and horrifically, painfully slaughtered a "white tight").
- Ants are the only type of animals - other than humans - to do large scale battles; and by default, all ants who go out there and fight the wars are female, making them perhaps the single largest amazon brigade that can or will ever exist, with a number estimated in the quadrillions.
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